


Indiana Jones and the Provenance of Relics

by Fox



Category: Indiana Jones Series, Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:55:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5468963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fox/pseuds/Fox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An improbable number of absurd things had happened in their lives before now, so they couldn't really conclude that this, of all things, was a bridge too far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Indiana Jones and the Provenance of Relics

**Author's Note:**

  * For [st_aurafina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/gifts).



Indy couldn't fight his promotion. Not that he didn't try, of course, but ultimately he had to accept the bigger office, the raise in pay, and the fifty-percent reduction in his teaching load. He grumbled about it, but Charlie threw in a couple of phone calls and made sure Mutt's application to Stanford got in front of the right people, even though it was past the deadline, and the day Mutt left for Palo Alto was the day Indy put the last of his books on the last of the shelves in his new digs. They thought life would settle down and they could live quietly and in peace after the El Dorado thing, but in fact what happened was that life got back to normal. Not the same at all.

Marion had reopened the Nest with a total lack of difficulty. Maybe they should have been at least a little suspicious at how easily the permits went through and the licenses came back and everything. But given all the bizarre things that had happened in both their lives over the past thirty years, the city inspector signing all the approvals on his first walkthrough didn't even strike either Indy or Marion as even the slightest bit odd. If they'd been at all wary, they might have been a little more prepared when things started getting weird. Live and learn.

In the event, Indy was holding up the end of the bar one Saturday afternoon when the door opened and Marion looked up and within seconds was flying toward it with that delighted grin on her face and into—hang on, into the arms of a good-looking young guy he had never seen before. Indy slid off his stool and took a few steps toward the front of the place, doing his best to pretend he was just waiting for his turn to be introduced.

"Come on in!" Marion was gushing, dragging the attractive stranger in toward the bar. "My god, you haven't changed a bit. This is my husband, Colonel Professor Henry Jones, Junior. Indy, meet Jack Harkness."

"Sir." Harkness snapped to attention, actually threw a salute.

"Oh, uh. At ease, son." The kid relaxed. "Harkness, is it?"

"Yes, sir." He shook Indy's hand vigorously. "Wow, Indiana Jones. It is a lucky break to be meeting you."

"I—"

"In town on business. I should have figured." Marion jerked her head toward a couple of stools and went around behind the bar to get down three glasses.

* * *

Turned out Harkness had been a buddy of Colin Williams's in the RAF. That was fifteen or twenty years ago, and the guy looked like he was about thirty, which didn't add up any way Indy could work out, but Marion didn't seem to be concerned about it and he couldn't get any of his conversational volleys in that direction to stick. They only wanted to talk about a vase he was looking for. "More like a small pitcher or a ewer," he clarified. "Probably decorated with figures of bees. Friend of mine calls it the bug jug."

"This is New York, Captain. It's not known as a major archaeological field site."

"Oh, I'm not an archaeologist. Not in the same way as you are, that is. I deal with artifacts that have been circulating while yours have been waiting to be discovered."

"Well—I can arrange for you to have access to the library at Marshall, I suppose—."

"That would be a great start. The best information I was able to get before I came over here suggested that it was last seen in the northeastern United States, but that's all I've got. Any leads would be helpful; I've got to be able to tell my colleagues I'm at least making progress."

* * *

Indy hadn't heard of any ceramic or stone vessels with bee decorations making the rounds. He and his department were careful to stay aware of who was digging where and what they were finding. He didn't think he'd missed an amphora with bees on it from any of the Hellenists, Egyptologists, Mayanists, or anyone else while he was trekking down the Amazon—or any time before that, given that Harkness said it had been dug up some time ago. Charlie hadn't heard of such a thing either, but they both agreed there wasn't much harm their guest could get up to in the library, so they signed a card admitting him as a visiting scholar and made sure he knew how to find their offices if he needed anything.

* * *

"It doesn't seem like your friend knows an awful lot about this object," Indy said to Marion at the dinner table the next evening.

"Little jar, covered in bees?"

"Sure, but what time period, what material, what civilization, for crying out loud—and why would it be here?"

"I don't know. Why would the headpiece of the Staff of Ra be in Nepal?" She grinned at him and stood up to take her plate to the kitchen. "How does anything end up anywhere?" she called back over her shoulder. "Someone must have carried it here from somewhere else."

He followed her with his own dishes. "If it's in a museum, there should be records of who had it and where it stopped along the way."

"Ha! You talk a good game, Jones, but how many of the things you've gone looking for around the world have had records of their own travels?"

"Not many," he admitted. "But they've almost all ended up in museums. So we know where they are, even if we don't always know how they got there."

"Sounds like the story of my life." Marion grinned and handed Indy a towel so she could wash and then hand him the dishes to dry.

* * *

By the second week, it looked to Indy and Marion like Jack was going to lose his mind. "Sorry," he said, raking his hand back through his hair. "I just didn't figure this thing would be this hard to track down. I hadn't planned to spend this long here—I'm really out of my element."

"Have you been able to get in touch with your colleagues?"

"Not exactly; I can talk to people who can talk to them, but right now they barely know I'm gone."

"How can that—"

"It's complicated. Only I have to find this bug jug soon if I'm going to be able ever to have tried." He knocked back the rest of his drink and slapped the bar. "I'll let you know if I have any luck today. See you later." And he was gone.

Marion and Indy looked at each other. "Did he say if he was going to be able to have tried to look for the thing, he has to find it soon?"

"That's what it sounded like to me."

"Make sense to you?"

"I was hoping you'd know what he meant."

"We must be getting old."

He smiled; he could see her thinking _it's not the years, it's the mileage_ right along with him. "Must be. Pour me one more before I head out?"

* * *

It wasn't too long after that that things did start getting weird. A couple of Marion's regulars didn't show up for a couple of nights, and when they returned, they were oddly not themselves, kind of shaken up and forgetful. Nobody could get them to remember where they'd been; everyone wondered what had happened to them. Separately, an unusual number of people around town began talking about seeing strange lights or hearing strange noises. Not bright lights or loud noises, but just enough out of the ordinary that people were noticing things at the edge of their perception. Indy was ready to chalk the whole thing up to widespread paranoia; then he had to go back up to campus one evening, and halfway there he experienced a definite and unimagined sensation he could only describe later as the creeps. As if someone had walked across his grave, his father would have said. He saw a strange light out of the corner of his eye, and when he turned to look at it, he heard a strange sound out of his other ear—and if the kind of adventures he used to get dragged into were going to come find him here at the college, he guessed it was good he kept his gun in his desk drawer. He ran for his office.

Muscle memory took him to his old office first, and as soon as the key to his new office wouldn't open the old door he realized he'd sidetracked himself and ran from the building cursing under his breath. The creepy feeling of dread hadn't gone away, which was creepy in and of itself, and he somehow knew he had to get to his office—his new office—before something happened. He banged through a side door to the administration building and saw someone disappear around a corner and down a dark hallway. He shouted and ran harder, but when he got around the corner himself the person he was pursuing was right there.

It was Marion. "As soon as you left, I had the oddest feeling," she said. "Not that you were in danger, but that something very strange was going to happen. Or had already happened. Or both, in a way—I just knew I had to come down here."

"Me too."

"What's going on?"

"I don't know. But stay close to me." Together they crept down the hall toward the dean's office. 

* * *

What they found when they got there was certainly what had been giving them both the creeping horrors. Indy's office door was open, and a weird purple light was emanating from it. They crept to the doorway and looked in, where they saw Jack Harkness in the desk drawers up to his elbows and shouting over his shoulder through the open window, which was the source of the purple light and a kind of hissing humming noise. "Look, I believe you," he was saying, "but it's not here right now. If he says this is where I got it from, can we get someone to plant it here two minutes ago so I don't have to do this again?"

"Sorry to interrupt," Indy began.

Harkness snapped around to look at him. Them. His face lit up unexpectedly. "Fantastic," he said. "I think I've almost got what I came for, and then I'll be out of your hair. Can you come reach into this drawer here on my left?"

The pause probably wasn't as long as it felt before Indy and Marion both started shouting at him.

* * *

Ultimately, though, everything turned out all right, as it always did. Harkness was able, somehow, combined with his eagerness to please Indy, to convince them that he wasn't a threat or much of a thief. He was talking, he said, to his colleagues—and a couple of voices did call hello through the purple light in the window, for whatever that was worth—who had conclusively determined that this office was without a shadow of doubt where he, Jack, was to find the pitcher with the bee figures on it. They knew this, apparently, because he had already done this. And the way they knew he had already done this was that Indiana Jones had told them so.

Of course that was absurd, but as they later reflected, an improbable number of absurd things had happened in their lives before now, so they couldn't really conclude that this, of all things, was a bridge too far. Thuggee priest holding a guy's still-beating heart in his hand as it bursts into flames? Sure. Angels of death ravaging a whole assembly of Nazis but sparing the two of them because they happened to have their eyes closed? Why not. Seven-hundred-year-old knight able to converse fluently in modern English? Okay. Spaceship full of telepathic aliens under the rainforest? If Marion and Colin's best friend was after all that a time traveler with the curse of immortality, Indy and Marion decided, who were they to argue?

They didn't know why Harkness and his team needed the bee jar thing so badly, but it did seem to be important if they were shouting about it through a purple-lit window from whatever point in the future they were shouting from. He hadn't found it in any of Indy's desk drawers, but now that Indy and Marion were here, somehow everyone was more optimistic. Indy got down and reached into his middle left desk drawer himself, shoving past a bottle of bourbon and a couple of files and finding a spot in the back of the drawer that gave just a bit. "I swear I didn't know there was a hidden compartment in here," he said as he slid the panel aside—

—and naturally, what he pulled out was a small container, a cup, really, about three inches across and four high, made of something smooth and hard that he wouldn't bet his life was of Earth origin and decorated with the images of three insects with black and yellow bodies and delicate wings. Bees.

He would never have made this something worth breaking into an office in the middle of the night for. If he had known he'd had it in his desk, he'd probably have put it _on_ his desk and used it to store pencils or paper clips. Too late for that now, though; in order not to make his future self a liar, he thought he understood, he had to hand the object over to Harkness.

"Fantastic. _Fantastic,_ " Harkness said, tucking the thing into a pocket of his coat and hurriedly trying to put Indy's office back to rights. "You have no idea what you've just done. You've saved our lives, for sure. Probably saved the world." He hugged and kissed Marion and then surprised Indy by hugging and kissing him too. "I've got to go. I'll see you both again soon, okay? Well, it'll be soon for me. I'll tell you about it when you get there. Thanks again. _Really._ " And he climbed through the window into the purple light. ("I've got it, guys," they heard him calling to his colleagues in the haze. And Marion would later swear she heard someone say, "This? Who said it was a pitcher? More like a bug mug.")

Indy and Marion stood looking after him for several moments. "I'm not hallucinating right now, am I?" he finally asked.

"Not unless I am, too," she said.

He took her hand and they looked at the window a little longer.

"Purple light's not going away," Marion finally said. "Want to see what's back there?"

**Author's Note:**

> I know it's just a smidge of a thing, but I hope it has a mood and a tone that please you. :-D


End file.
